Holiday Surprises
by Sita Z
Summary: It's Hoshi's birthday on the 23rd of December, and Trip and Malcolm decide to surprise her.


AN: Not betaed, because I finished it just in time to post it today – sorry!

I wrote a rather angsty story for the holiday challenge over at the Slash list, and I wanted to do something light for my Gen Christmas fic. Oh, and I borrowed Müller again. Hope that was okay, volley!

Warning: Quite a lot of silliness and intentional destruction of pecan nuts.

Enjoy!

* * *

Hoshi brushed her hair back and checked her reflection in the metal panel on the turbolift wall. Wearing her hair open rather than tied back in her usual pony tail suited her, if she did say so herself. It wasn't exactly bridge protocol, of course, but she had indulged herself today.

The wall display changed to "A deck", and the lift came to a gentle halt. Hoshi glanced at her reflection once more, and smiled at herself.

What else was a birthday for?

The doors slid open and she stepped onto the bridge. She was a few minutes early as usual, and Ensign Namarro was still sitting at the communications console.

Captain Archer swiveled around in his chair, greeting her with a smile. "Good morning, Hoshi," he said. "Happy birthday."

"Thank you, Captain."

"Yeah, happy birthday," Travis added, and she was pretty sure that he'd noticed the hair. His eyebrows had gone up, anyway. "Twenty-nine, right?"

She nodded, heading over to her station. "One more year until the dreaded twenty-tenth."

"Plenty of time to find some trigger-happy aliens," he grinned before he turned back to his station.

She smiled as well, nodding at her replacement who vacated her chair for her. It was an ongoing joke between her and Travis that they would both arrange to be shot on an away mission before they turned thirty.

T'Pol raised an eyebrow at her. "Why would you need to encounter a hostile species before the next anniversary of your birth?"

Ignoring a chuckle from the helm, Hoshi replied, "It's just a joke, Subcommander. Humans like to joke about getting older."

"I see," T'Pol said, and Hoshi could almost see her filing away the information. "May I offer my felicitations to your natal day, Ensign?"

Hoshi was surprised; it was the first time she'd ever heard the Subcommander wish anyone a happy birthday. "Thank you."

She'd noticed earlier that Müller, Malcolm's second-in-command, was manning the Tactical station, which was odd. Alpha shift had just started, and it wasn't like Malcolm to be late. Usually he'd be there five or ten minutes early.

She leaned over to the Science Station.

"Subcommander?" she asked, keeping her voice low so that only T'Pol would be able to hear her. If for some reason Malcolm _was_ late, she didn't want to draw the Captain's attention to the fact. With T'Pol that was a moot point, as the Vulcan would notice anyway.

T'Pol looked up. "Ensign?"

Hoshi threw a quick glance at Tactical, where Müller sat intent on his station. "Is Lieutenant Reed alright?"

T'Pol's eyebrows twitched slightly, and if Hoshi hadn't known better, she would have said that a flicker of... _something_ had just crossed the Vulcan's dispassionate face.

"Lieutenant Reed... is off duty this morning," T'Pol replied. Hoshi noticed the slight hesitation, and decided that something was definitely off.

"He's not sick, is he?"

He'd looked fine when she'd seen him in the messhall yesterday, but then, Malcolm tended to hide any illnesses until someone noticed and dragged him to sickbay.

"T'Pol?"

"Lieutenant Reed has had a minor accident," the Science Officer replied, glancing at the Captain for some reason. "The doctor is confident that he and Commander Tucker will be able to resume their duties tomorrow morning."

A strange noise came from the helm, almost like a... snort. Hoshi looked up, and saw that Travis' shoulders were shaking slightly, as if he were trying very hard not to burst out laughing. Bewildered, she turned to the Captain, and her frown deepened when she saw a smile tugging at Archer's mouth. Even Müller seemed to be biting back a grin.

"Sir?" she asked, no longer bothering to keep her voice down. "Excuse me, sir, but what happened to Commander Tucker and Lieutenant Reed?"

Archer couldn't keep his grin out of sight anymore, clearly amused as he answered, "Don't worry, Hoshi, they'll be fine."

"Yes sir." She didn't point out that T'Pol had told her so already. "It just seems that everyone knows what happened to them except me."

"That was the idea," Travis chuckled. Seeing her glare, he added, "It was supposed to be a birthday surprise."

"A birthday..." She blinked. "Wait a minute. Are you saying that Trip and Malcolm ended up in sickbay while making a birthday surprise for me?"

T'Pol's eyebrows twitched again. "An accurate summary of the situation, Ensign."

Hoshi stared at her. And to think that the day had only just begun.

* * *

_Ten hours earlier..._

"You've gotta grease it first."

"I am aware of that, Commander. I may not have done this before, but I believe I have a rudimentary grasp of the basics."

"Okay, jeez. Just wanted to make sure. 'Cause if you forget to grease it..."

"... it will stick, I _know_. Why don't you make yourself useful and find me a paper towel rather than lecturing me on proper technique."

"What d'ya need the towel for?"

"To make myself a paper hat. I need something to apply the grease with, don't I?"

"J'st use your hands, Malcolm! This isn't rocket science, you know!"

Malcolm gritted his teeth. When he'd agreed to do this, he'd known that they would probably end up arguing at some point; it seemed inevitable. He'd even been prepared to let Trip order him around, considering the engineer's superior experience in this field. But here he was, itching to strangle the man, and they hadn't even gotten started.

"Trip, I'm not going to use my hands to grease the baking tray. That's not exactly hygienic, and I doubt Chef will be happy if he discovers finger prints in the cooking fat."

"Y'know, not everyone's as fussy as-"

Trip's answer was abruptly cut off by the sound of something solid hitting the floor, followed by a string of angry expletives. Malcolm turned around, and his eyes widened at the sight. Apparently, Trip had managed to drop a bag of flour, which had burst and spread its content all over the deck in front of the storage compartment. A flour-sprinkled, swearing Chief Engineer was currently kneeling in the middle of the mess, trying to scrape it together with his hands and spreading it even further in the process.

"Bloody hell, Trip! Couldn't you be more careful?"

Trip glared at him, but the effect was mostly ruined by the large white smudges on his face. "It was an accident, okay? Damn bag slipped out of my hand."

Malcolm took a closer look at the open compartment over Trip's head, and saw that the bags of flour were sitting on the highest shelf, which Trip would be able to reach only by standing on tip toes and groping blindly for his quarry.

"Too lazy to get ourselves a chair, were we, Commander?"

Malcolm took the drop-dead glare he received as confirmation. Trip, who seemed to realize that sweeping up the flour with his hands wasn't such a good idea, climbed to his feet and began to brush off his clothes. Clouds of white powder rose into the air, making him cough.

Malcolm sighed and turned around again. Maybe they'd better use a baking sheet rather than greasing the tray. Might make less of a mess, and from the way things looked, there would be enough cleaning up to do after they were done here.

"Tell me again why we are baking Christmas cookies as a birthday surprise."

He glanced over his shoulder at Trip, who was crawling around on the deck trying to sweep the flour onto a dustpan. Mostly he was stirring up even more white dust, which floated around him and slowly settled on his head, back and shoulders. It looked as if someone had covered the Commander with a very thin film of icing.

"It's bad enough if your birthday's the twenty-third of December," Trip said, coughing when more flour got into his mouth. "Everyone's too busy to organize a party, and you've gotta spend your whole birthday cleanin' the house and wrappin' up your Christmas presents. I figured she could do with a surprise."

"But wouldn't she rather appreciate something else then?" Malcolm asked hopefully. Maybe there was a way out of this yet. "Something that has nothing to do with Christmas?"

"I'll have ya know that this is a..."

"...prize-winning recipe, I know." He'd been sworn to secrecy before Trip had let him on the intricacies of preparing Butter Pecan Chocolate-Chip Cookies, a recipe that had been handed down from one generation of Tuckers to the next since colonial times. Or so Trip said. "But maybe we could try something less... complex? I mean, we're both not exactly experts when it comes to-"

"Ow! Dammit all the way to..."

Malcolm turned around again, blinking when he saw Trip kneeling under one of the worktables and holding his head. "What on Earth are you doing?"

That got him a sour look. "What's it look like to you? I'm tryin' to clean up the damn flour. It's gotten everywhere."

Malcolm sighed. "Maybe you'd better leave it for now. We'll have to mop the place anyway. And get yourself a chair this time," he added when he saw Trip getting up. "I'd rather not have to explain to Chef why we used up his entire supply of flour."

Trip muttered something that sounded like "nag nag nag", but Malcolm decided to ignore him for now and returned his attention to the task at hand. Trip had assigned him to shell the pecan nuts and cut them into halves, which was turning out to be more difficult than expected. The nut cracker he'd found in a drawer was bloody useless and so far, every nut he'd been trying to open had either resisted the attempt or exploded into a thousand tiny pieces. By now, the table in front of him looked as if it had been hit by a detonation wave.

He glanced around. There had to be something else he could use to crack the nut shells, something that would allow him to exert more force with greater precision. Or, he thought as his eyes fell on the shelf with kitchen appliances, maybe just more force would do. Trip was still busy at the larder compartment, and so Malcolm could sneak past him unnoticed, grab the instrument that had caught his attention and return to the table. This was going to speed things up if he had anything to say about it. He swept the broken bits and pieces aside and placed one of the pecans right in the middle of the table. Now all he needed to do was to determine the angle that would result in maximum impact.

It was then that Trip turned around on his chair, eyes widening when he saw Malcolm with both hands raised over his head.

"Malcolm, no!"

But Malcolm had already brought the kitchen mallet down, though not with the intended effect. Rather than yielding under the impact, the pecan shot off the table and with great precision and force, hit the Chief Engineer directly on the nose.

"OW!"

Another bag of flour burst on the floor as Trip grabbed his nose, howling with pain. He was wobbling dangerously, and Malcolm took a quick step towards him to catch the engineer before he toppled over, chair and all. He realized a second too late that under the circumstances, quick movements on a slippery surface could result in a catastrophe. Arms flailing, he lost his balance and crashed into the chair which promptly tipped over.

Trip didn't land on top of him; if that had happened Malcolm was sure he would have been in for a few broken ribs. As it was, Trip's knee came down hard on his wrist. There was an evil crack, and Malcolm cried out when a flare of pain shot through his arm into his shoulder.

"Fuck!" Trip quickly moved away, eyes wide with shock. "Did you hurt yourself, Malcolm?"

"My wrist," Malcolm said between clenched teeth. "I think it's..." He glanced down at the limb in question, and quickly looked away again. _That_ wasn't supposed to bend _there_.

Trip seemed to have noticed it as well, if his pale face was anything to go by. "I'll... I'll go and..."

He tried to climb to his feet and promptly cried out, his left ankle giving way as soon as he put weight on it. "Dammit. I think I've sprained it."

He sat down again on the flour covered floor, looking around the galley. "Chef's gonna kill us, that's for sure."

Malcolm was inclined to agree. The room looked as if a tornado of flour had blown through it, coating the floor, the tables and themselves with a film of white powder. The chair had skidded across the floor and knocked over a wheeled equipment table, scattering cutlery all over the deck. Not to mention the mess he'd made with the pecans, and the baking equipment they'd randomly pulled out and stacked on every available surface.

He tried to get to his feet and hissed with pain when the movement jostled his wrist.

"Wait," Trip motioned for him to stay where he was. "I'll get a dish towel to make a sling."

The engineer slowly got to his feet, wincing as he set his left foot on the floor. "How'd that happen?" he asked, his expression one of genuine astonishment. "One minute I was gettin' another bag of flour..."

"I believe it was mostly my fault, Commander," Malcolm admitted. "If I hadn't used a meat mallet to crack nuts..."

"Yeah, and if I'd gotten myself a chair in the first place..."

They looked at each other.

"No way we can make up a cover story for this, is there?" Morosely, Trip nodded at the chaos around them.

Malcolm sighed, shaking his head. There never was, really.

* * *

Entering the messhall that night, Hoshi was hard-pressed not to smile at the sight that presented itself to her. Malcolm and Trip were sitting at a table by the window, both nursing a cup of tea, two empty dinner trays pushed to one side. Trip was facing the door, his bandaged ankle propped on an empty chair. When she came closer, Hoshi saw that his nose was slightly swollen, and let out an inward sigh of relief. The shipwide rumor mill had it that the Chief Engineer had arrived in sickbay with blood spilling down from a broken nose, but this looked bruised at worst.

"Hey, Hosh," Trip greeted her. Malcolm had been sitting with his back to the door, but now he got up and, ever the gentleman, offered her a chair. Trying to be discreet, she glanced at his injured wrist and saw that he was wearing an aircast – not, as gossip went, a huge plaster with stitches peeking out from under it.

"Ensign," he said, and she quickly looked up again.

"Thank you." She took a seat on the offered chair, and set the bottle she'd brought from her quarters on the table. "You gentlemen up for a nightcap?"

Trip's eyebrows went up as he read the label on the bottle. "Andorian Ale? Where the hell did you get a hold of that?"

She smirked. "You'd be surprised what good communication skills can achieve. And I figured the two of you could use something stronger than black tea."

It was hard to bite back a smile at the sheepish expressions on their faces, but she resisted the temptation. She knew for a fact that the two had been teased to hell and back for their disastrous attempt at baking cookies; even T'Pol had managed to get a dry remark in, expressing her relief that the Commander hadn't decided to pursue a career in the culinary business. Chef had been furious about the mess in his galley, of course, telling everyone he met that he would make "those two maniacs" clean every nook and cranny of the place once they had sufficiently recovered.

Considering all that, Hoshi had decided not to add any teasing of her own. In fact, she was touched that they would go to such lengths just to make a surprise for her.

Trip sighed. "You bet. I'm sorry you didn't get any cookies though. They're the best, if you make them right."

"And that we didn't exactly..." Malcolm glanced down at his injured wrist and shook his head. "At least the Captain agreed to keep the incident out of official records."

What he didn't say was that there was no way to remove the "incident" from Enterprise's unofficial records, where it would be preserved for eternity.

Hoshi poured two fingers of Ale into the three glasses she'd brought. "Here," she said. "To birthday surprises."

"And to you," Malcolm added, raising his glass. "Many happy returns, Hoshi."

"Happy birthday, Hosh." Trip clinked his glass against hers. "Hope it was a good one."

She smiled. "Yes, it was."

-fin-

A Butter Pecan Chocolate-Chip Cookie for you if you leave a review!


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